Engineering complex devices over the Internet

STANFORD -- The device is about the size and shape of a squat
silver thermos. Its business end is rounded, and capped with an arcing black
tripod. It does not look like a complicated electromechanical device, but it
is. Called an optical seeker, it can lock on and track a dot of laser light
shining on a distant object. Similar devices are used in the guidance system
of laser-guided missiles.

What is unique about this device is not what it is or what it can do, but
how it was made. The optical seeker was designed and built by a team of
engineers, assembled from a dozen different universities and companies, who
worked not face to face but over the Internet. Aside from a handful of
in-person meetings, they communicated primarily by e-mail and teleconference,
and by exchanging graphics, videos and computer files electronically.

The seeker was a test of the capabilities being developed as part of the
Department of Defense Advanced Research Project Agency's efforts to
dramatically improve the defense industry's entire design and manufacturing
process.

The agency's Manufacturing Automation and Design Engineering (MADE)
program is attempting to improve its work by developing tools that will allow
companies to assemble effective interdisciplinary engineering design teams
from different organizations and different parts of the country to tackle
individual projects. Theoretically, such capability will allow defense
contractors to respond more flexibly to changing requirements and product
opportunities than if they continue to maintain large, multidisciplinary
research groups in house.

In a February 1994 meeting, ARPA project manager Pradeep Khosla challenged
a group of contractors who had not previously collaborated to design and
build a product in six months using the tools that had been developed in the
MADE program. Six months is a fraction of the time that it takes to develop
such a prototype using normal procedures.

"I stood up and accepted the challenge," said Stanford mechanical
engineering Professor Larry Leifer. But because Leifer's colleague, Mark
Cutkosky, associate professor of mechanical engineering, was on sabbatical
and didn't have teaching responsibilities, he ended up becoming the project
manager. He was assisted by George Toye, a Stanford mechanical engineering
research associate, who led campus circuit-board and software development
efforts.

Within a matter of days after the challenge, the MADE engineers launched a
product "dream team" made up of industry and academic people from across
the country, Cutkosky said. Engineers from Stanford and the University of
Utah coordinated the development process. Stanford focused on the electrical
and optical design elements, while Utah concentrated on the mechanical
aspects. They were joined by engineers from 10 other universities and
companies. By April, the members of the project, dubbed MADEFAST, received
the specifications for the optical seeker and began the design process.

"We made a conscious effort to use as many emerging technologies as
possible, including some that were not quite ready for prime time," Cutkosky
said. "We decided to do as much communication as possible electronically."

The technologies they used consisted of a disparate collection of
experimental Internet services and concurrent engineering tools that had
never been integrated before. Examples include Design Sheet, a symbolic
spreadsheet developed by Rockwell International that handles equations rather
than numbers; Alpha_1, a solids modeling system developed at the University
of Utah that converts computer designs into instructions for numerical
machine tools; and the Device Modeling Environment, developed by Stanford's
Knowledge Systems Laboratory, which creates a detailed engineering model of
electromechanical devices.

The participants managed to meet the challenge deadline. A working
prototype of the optical seeker, made at a cost of less than $200,000, was
demonstrated at a MADE program workshop in Salt Lake City in November 1994.
Since then, the researchers, led by Toye, have been working on a "beta"
version that is smaller and more self- contained because it has a more
compact electronics package. The beta version was completed in June.

"We did it. MADEFAST demonstrated a working model in six months at a
fraction of the cost presently associated with equivalent development
projects," said Rich Riesenfeld, who headed the University of Utah team.

Engineers at Michigan State University made the seeker's composite parts.
MSU's James K. McDowell said that "MADEFAST showed that researchers
interested in advanced technology for design and manufacturing could actually
collaborate and produce an interesting artifact under reduced
design/manufacturing cycle times. For MSU/MADEFAST it was a successful test
of some of our ideas about integrated materials, part and process design."

ARPA's Khosla said that "MADEFAST is the right model for how design will
be done in the future."

World Wide Web's role

One of the key tools that the engineers used was the World Wide Web, which
allowed them to post scheduling information, specifications, graphics,
animations and even video that was accessible to all the participants. The
MADEFAST Web pages provided detailed documentation of the process.

"It was a bit awkward at first, but it provides a richer documentation of
the development process," Stanford's Cutkosky said. "When you have people
from different areas, from different backgrounds, you need very thorough
design documentation. Generally, it is not done very well." As a result of
the elaborate documentation, people who were brought into the project halfway
through were able to familiarize themselves with the project. "They looked
at the documentation. They talked to me. We had them up to speed in a couple
of days," Cutkosky said.

Industry today spends a great deal of time and energy in the "reinventing
of wheels" because companies don't understand, or don't know, what others
have done, Cutkosky said. Extensive electronic design documentation of the
sort developed for MADEFAST could reduce duplication of effort, he said.

The group found at least one problem with using the Web for documentation,
however. Because of its "hyperlink" capability that allows users to jump
back and forth among various pages, there is no linear information flow. "We
need to find ways to make it coherent; otherwise it will get lost," Cutkosky
said.

"I think that the single biggest challenge that we, as a distributed
project team, had to overcome was communication difficulty," said Carolyn
Valiquette, the project coordinator for the University of Utah. This classic
project management problem is greatly magnified by the introduction of
geographic distance between team members."

The initial video conference that was supposed to allow team members at
Stanford and Utah to get acquainted proved ineffective, Cutkosky said.
Communications did not really begin flowing until the two teams met face to
face.

"All of the multimedia, including videoconferencing and the exchange of
graphics, doesn't work well without some face-to-face contact. Despite all
the new technology, that still holds true. I have to trust you'll do what you
say you will do. You need to trust what I'm asking is reasonable," he said.

Added Valiquette: "No matter how high the bandwidth, a teleconference
cannot take the place of getting to know one another in person. Once the Utah
and Stanford teams spent a day together, subsequent long-distance discussions
were much more productive."

Cultural differences between the participants also caused some problems.
For example, Stanford researchers were considerably more proficient on e-mail
than their Utah counterparts. As a result, some Utah participants became
annoyed by the volume of e-mail that they received, while some Stanford
engineers became aggravated when their electronic messages went
unacknowledged and unanswered.

Despite problems of this sort, the participants generally predict that
collaborations of this sort are the wave of the future.

"Whether we like it or not, this is the way engineering and commerce are
moving, toward doing distributed design and engineering over the Internet,"
Cutkosky said. Although the seeker was a relatively small project, as defense
projects go, he said that "scaling up is not much of an issue. The process
could be used for designing things like jet engines."

Utah's Valiquette added: "I think we are a long way from all of this
being 'as easy as e-mail,' but the groundwork being done now will surely lead
to better, faster communication over the net."

As a video that the participants are producing concludes: "This is the
future! This is how engineering and business will be done."

-dfs-

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